The letter arrived the other day from the man who was once the face of college football. The man who for decades roamed the sidelines and won national championships and big games and raised a handful of coaches in the process.

The man who is now just as happy being Dad again.

Dear Terry:

We’re all now looking at you ... Our first step every morning is to go online and read about the Zips! … You will be back on top again. It’s not a matter of if, but when.

“To get that kind of affirmation from my Dad, from a man like him,” Terry Bowden says slowly, “it’s very humbling.”

Bobby Bowden has always said the best coach in the Bowden Family is Terry, and never hesitates when making that bold statement. Heck, he says it in front of his other boys, too.

Said it when Terry had Auburn on top of the college football world in the early 1990s; said it when Terry took a decade hiatus from the sport; said it when Terry returned to the NCAA lower divisions at North Alabama.

And says it now with Terry staring down the biggest rebuilding process in the nation as the new coach at Akron.

“It’s not close,” Bobby says.

They started fall camp last week at Akron, the mid-level program with the BCS facilities, stuck in the shadows of Ohio State and coming off back-to-back 1-11 seasons that got former coach Rob Ianello fired.

They won the MAC in 2005, and haven’t had a winning season since. They opened a brand new $65 million stadium in 2009, and have won five games since. At one point prior to last season, one Akron staffer gave Sporting News insight into the culture and lack of identity at Akron.

“The kids would come to workouts wearing Ohio State gear,” he said.

No wonder they finished in the bottom 10 of almost every major NCAA statistical category last season. No wonder they haven’t won a MAC road game since 2008.

No wonder when Akron went looking for a new coach, Bowden eagerly accepted. Yeah, he wanted to get back into major college football. But he also—get this—wanted rock bottom.

“If you’re going to take over a program that’s down,” Bowden said, “it may as well be one that’s way down.”

And so it began last December, Terry’s return to major college football: a little more gray on his head and a little rounder at the waist than the last time he roamed the sidelines at Auburn. He turned around things quickly on The Plains in Year 1, just like he did at Salem and Samford before that—and has Akron players believing it can happen again.

He points to a framed photo of Ace Atkins on the cover of a national magazine, his arms wrapped around Florida quarterback Danny Wuerffel in the 1993 game that started Bowden’s rise at Auburn. The ragtag group of players who were 5-5-1 the previous season; who had lost to the new SEC power Florida by a combined 103-26 the previous three years, beat the Gators 38-35 in a game that wasn’t even shown on television because of NCAA sanctions.

Auburn finished 11-0 that year—the same year his dad’s Florida State team won the national title with one loss.

“Ace Atkins was a walkon who played his guts out,” Bowden said. “Everybody has to play a part here, everyone helps. You can go from 5-5-1 to undefeated or 1-10 to 6-6. That gives these guys something to hold onto.”

So does the FSU Plan, the system that helped Bobby become the winningest coach in major college history, and the system Terry has used at every coaching stop. He even has reached to the past to help the transition at Akron, hiring longtime FSU assistant (and former NC State head coach) Chuck Amato to run the defense, and former FSU All-American Terrell Buckley to coach the defensive backs.

Todd Stroud, an FSU captain in the 1980s and one of the most beloved Seminoles, coaches the defensive line.

“The band is back together,” Amato joked.

It just needs some fine-tuning. Like the quarterback spot, where the two players who led the team to two wins the last two years transferred after Bowden made it clear that redshirt freshman Kyle Pohl or senior transfer Dalton Williams would be his quarterback.

It’s a quarterback league in the MAC, a conference where the team with the best quarterback usually has a pretty good chance of winning the title. Akron will begin this fall on Aug. 30, a Thursday night at home against UCF on the first official day of the season—with a quarterback who has never taken a game snap (Pohl) or a transfer who last year was a backup at FCS Stephen F. Austin.

That just makes the return of Bowden to major college football that much sweeter. There were times when he thought he’d never coach at this level again, when the politics of the game and booster influence had drained his love for all things pigskin.

A year after resigning from Auburn midseason in 1998—before he would’ve been fired—Bowden had a chance to get back in. Texas Tech fired Spike Dykes, and offered Bowden the job that Mike Leach eventually took when Bowden had convinced himself he was through coaching.

Nearly 15 years later, the best of the Bowden coaches returns with zero expectations. And, finally, a full tank again.

“It’s a canvas, an empty canvas,” Bowden said. “And we get to paint the picture from Day 1.”